The Star You Bought Me Burned Out Today

[indigolivia]

I drink enough beer to remember folding the blanket on itself to pull you closer to me. I remember the arguments like road trips, so long and grueling they required bathroom breaks. I was always the one driving. I think about the hundreds of miles of emotional space between us, and I reconcile it with the thousand miles physically between us, now. Much like keeping an avoidant gaze towards interesting attractions off the highway exit on real road trips, I cannot miss what I do not see. I don't drive at all, now. I am on trains and buses and my own two feet, which bring me to sets of steps all around the city, and I sit, and I look up because the pigs cannot. I find our star, a different one every night surely, but in that moment it is the one you got me for my birthday. 

One too many beers, and about ten too many new bodies in my bed, and I am making eyes at a twinkling light in the black blanket of the night. I see it sparkle, I watch it wink, and it is gone forever. I know I am drunk, I know I am probably just a victim of hazy vision and impaired judgement, but I realize the optical illusion of a star. I realize that to watch it burn out in front of me, means it had already exploded a million years ago. Meaning there never was a star to give me on my birthday, there was never a star to give, at all. I close my eyes. I open them, and I scan for one that looks like your wink again, but it burned out. and I cannot miss what I do not see.